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The 7-Day Back Pain Cure PDF

213 Pages·2010·2.49 MB·English
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The 7-Day Back Pain Cure The 7-Day Back Pain Cure How Thousands of People Got Relief Without Doctors, Drugs, or Surgery JESSE CANNONE Innovation Press San Francisco The information in this book is provided for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The author and publisher make no legal claims, express or implied, and the material is not intended to replace the services of a physician. The author, publisher, and/or copyright holder assume no responsibility for the loss or damage caused, or allegedly caused, directly or indirectly by the use of information contained in this book. The author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability incurred from the use or application of the contents of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Throughout this book trademarked names are referenced. Rather than putting a trademark symbol in every occurrence of a trademarked name, we state that we are using the names in an editorial fashion only and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Copyright © 2009 Jesse Cannone All Rights Reserved Published by Innovation Press, 182 Howard Street, Suite #185, San Francisco, CA 94105 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-9764624-8-4 For those who suffer back pain but no longer need to, and for my wonderful wife and children. CONTENTS PREFACE.........................................................................................I PART I: THE HIDDEN CAUSES OF BACK PAIN..... 1 1) THE SEVEN BACK-PAIN MISTAKES ..............................4 2) PAIN IS ONLY A SYMPTOM ........................................12 3) THE THREE HIDDEN CAUSES OF ALL BACK PAIN......20 4) THE BODY: THE PHYSICAL CAUSES OF PAIN .............26 5) THE MIND: HOW EMOTIONS CAUSE PHYSICAL PAIN ........................................................46 6) THE DIET: HOW DIETARY IMBALANCES CAUSE PAIN.............................................................58 7) HOW THE BODY, MIND, AND DIET INTERACT .........72 PART II: SOLUTIONS FOR A PAIN FREE LIFE .. 78 8) WHY MOST BACK PAIN TREATMENTS FAIL...............80 9) THE SOLUTION FOR A PAIN-FREE LIFE......................94 10) LIFESTYLE CHANGES THAT HELP ELIMINATE PAIN.104 11) MUSCLE-BALANCE THERAPY ..................................110 12) TRIGGER-POINT THERAPY .....................................116 13) INVERSION THERAPY..............................................128 14) BALANCE YOUR EMOTIONAL STATE OF MIND........138 15) BALANCE YOUR NUTRITION...................................146 PART III: PAIN RELIEF ACTION PLANS........154 16) GETTING STARTED: SEVEN-DAY ACTION PLANS ....156 17) SUMMARY OF TREATMENT OPTIONS......................162 18) LOWER BACK PAIN.................................................170 19) UPPER-BACK AND NECK PAIN ................................172 20) HERNIATED DISC...................................................174 21) SCIATICA................................................................178 22) SCOLIOSIS ..............................................................180 23) SPINAL STENOSIS....................................................184 24) SACROILIAC JOINT DYSFUNCTION..........................188 25) OTHER CONDITIONS .............................................190 26) YOUR PAIN-FREE LIFE ............................................192 27) RESOURCES ............................................................194 Preface Every back-pain sufferer has a story. I’m no exception. Mine involves an attractive woman, a marathon, a surgeon, a chiropractor, and a remarkable and entirely unexpected solution to back pain that I popularized called Muscle- Balance Therapy™. As publisher of the Less Pain, More Life e-mail newsletter (www.losethebackpain.com), I’m often asked by many of my 600,000 readers worldwide how I became one of the leading experts on using nonmedical approaches to resolving stubborn, recurring back pain. Here’s what is, I hope, my interesting, but somewhat embarrassing, story. Several years ago, I met a very attractive woman at the gym where I worked as a personal trainer. As every guy can tell you, sometimes we do stupid things to impress a girl, especially the woman of our dreams. For me, this was one of those times. I asked Maria out on a date and held my breath, awaiting her answer. Much to my relief, she smiled and said she was interested. Yes! I gave myself mental high fives while pretending, of course, to be a cool customer. Maria asked if I wanted to go running with her. Running? Oh, yeah, definitely. I love to run. But Maria wasn’t just any runner. Maria enjoyed marathons, all 26-plus miles of them. She wondered if I wanted to join her on one of her training workouts. (www.losethebackpain.com) iii The 7-Day Back Pain Cure I smiled and agreed. Maria smiled back, and then left. It was official. We had a date. I felt terrific, except for one small problem. I wasn’t actually a runner. But I couldn’t admit that to Maria. I had my fragile male ego to consider! True, I was a personal trainer and a bodybuilder, but I was more into lifting weights than running. I’d never really run more than a mile or two. Still, I figured I could keep up—or rather, I was going to make darn sure I could. Thankfully, my first run with Maria was great. We hit it off and I handled the four-mile jaunt without a problem. Since I kept up so well, we scheduled another run—this time, for eight miles. Our budding romance bloomed and my running shoes got a nice workout. Then came our third run. Since I’d managed eight miles, Maria decided to take me for 12. It wasn’t easy, but I did finish. After all, my fragile male ego had to finish, right? Tongue hanging out, I succeeded, and thought everything would be fine. Maria and I then went to the local grocery store. We were having a great conversation when suddenly my left knee buckled and I fell to the floor. When I tried to get up, I fell back down again. How embarrassing. Here I was, a 22-year- old bodybuilder, lying on the ground in pain, unable to walk, and failing miserably to impress this attractive woman. Several weeks went by, but my knee didn’t get any better. Assuming I’d injured it, I visited multiple doctors, chiropractors, and orthopedic surgeons. My X-rays showed healthy bones. My MRI showed normal soft tissues. What was going on? Even after multiple cortisone shots and tons of painkillers, the pain was still there. The orthopedic surgeon suggested surgery to “clean up” some of the debris in the fluid of the joint—even though other people with similar levels of debris experienced no pain. Preface iv I’d tried everything and still couldn’t walk. Desperate, I scheduled the surgery. Meanwhile, as part of an effort to expand my skills as a personal trainer, I was attending a seminar on fitness rehabilitation—a topic that now was even more relevant to my life. One of the presenters was a knee expert. After his talk, I spoke with him about my situation. He examined me, observing how I stood and how I walked. When he finished, he looked at me and said, “You don’t have a knee problem at all.” What? Obviously, this comment surprised me. But since the surgery was only a few days away, I asked him to continue. “The muscles on the left and right sides of your body are not in balance,” he said. “One side is much tighter than the other and it’s shifting most of your body weight to the left. That’s why your left knee is bothering you. It’s carrying most of your weight.” Because of this imbalance, he explained, I wasn’t really walking with both legs, but actually just sort of hopping on one. Hmmm…this might explain a lot. Of course, I’d never heard of such a thing as muscles being out of balance. But it was what he said next that changed my life. “Here, let me show you a stretch you can use to even out the difference in muscle flexibility between the left and right sides of your body. Try it.” I did what he suggested and within a few minutes felt a little better. I did that same stretch a few times every day for the next few days. Much to my surprise, my pain was 80 percent gone within three days and 100 percent gone within seven days. Needless to say, I canceled my surgery! v The 7-Day Back Pain Cure As if this wasn’t surprising enough, within a short period of time, two more of my other physical problems fixed themselves—scoliosis and back pain. When I was an elementary-school student, I had been given a physical a few days before school started. I was diagnosed with a mild case of scoliosis—a slightly abnormal curvature of the spine. Rather than running straight up and down, my spine had a bit of an “S” curve to it—with one part bowing slightly to the right and the other slightly to the left. Most likely this contributed to the second problem I had later in life—back pain. When I became a bodybuilder, I began to develop problems with my mid-back—the part between my shoulder blades. It always bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. But now an unusual thing happened. When I did the stretches to rebalance the muscles that were causing the pain in my knee, I unintentionally eliminated my back pain, too. In hindsight, I realized I never really had a knee problem, a back problem, or scoliosis. What I had was a muscle imbalance problem. One side of my body was tighter and less flexible than the other. This uneven tension pulled my spinal column to one side, causing what appeared to be scoliosis. This same tension compressed some of the nerves in my spine and in my mid-back region, causing my back pain. It also shifted my hips to favor one side of my body so that most of my body weight was borne by my left leg, and of course, my left knee. When I ran the 12 miles, which was pretty ambitious in itself, I didn’t really run 12 miles so much as hop 12 miles on one leg. Of course, after my initial collapse, when I should have given my knee a chance to rest, my muscles were still out of balance. Without realizing it, I kept putting all my weight on the bad knee just by walking through my daily life. It’s amazing my knee held up as long as it did! Preface vi To make matters worse, the imbalanced muscles that were pulling unevenly on my bad knee caused the joint to operate out of alignment. It’s like a car that has one tire half-filled with air. The whole car starts dragging to one side and all the parts wear unevenly until some part of the car breaks. By stretching and doing rebalancing exercises, I was able to restore the balance in my muscles and body frame, eliminate my pain quickly, and go on to live pain free. I became fascinated with how such a simple solution as stretching and doing muscle-balancing exercises could be so effective. Why weren’t my many doctors aware of this approach? I began telling my friends and family about what had happened to me. They wanted to know how they could stop their back pain like I had. Despite my desire to help them, I couldn’t point to any doctors, physical therapists, clinics, chiropractors, books, videos, or audiotapes that talked about this commonsense explanation of what causes back pain and how to get rid of it. The more I shared my story, the more people wanted to learn about the solution I’d found. I felt angry and frustrated that this information wasn’t being taught in medical schools or offered as an option ahead of drugs, shots, surgery, and other therapies that didn’t take this imbalanced-body phenomenon into account. I considered the possibility of trying to teach this form of self-treatment myself. But I’m not a medical doctor, orthopedic surgeon, chiropractor, or physical therapist (though I was getting close, as my personal-training practice had started to lean toward clients with back pain and injuries). Really, who was going to take me seriously? So, I did nothing and waited for the medical and chiropractic communities to catch up. I waited and waited and waited. Years went by, but nothing changed. My friends, vii The 7-Day Back Pain Cure family, and colleagues continued to get well-intentioned—but often incorrect—advice from people in positions of authority. Finally, unable to continue watching people suffer needlessly, I got fed up. I decided to forget my insecurities about not being a medical doctor and try to help as many other back-pain sufferers as I could—by teaching a solution I call Muscle-Balance Therapy. Since that day, I’ve trained more than 50,000 people to treat themselves through my video training, self-diagnosis, and self-treatment kit, along with my Less Pain, More Life e- mail newsletter, all of which can be found at www.losethebackpain.com. This book is my most recent effort to prevent back-pain sufferers like you from going through often unnecessary surgeries, injections, and drugs. While unbalanced muscles aren’t the only cause of back pain (the two other causes— related to diet and mental stress—also are covered in this book), they are the most common cause. In these pages, I’ll show you how to determine the underlying—and almost always hidden—causes of your back pain. Then I’ll show you how to use that knowledge to get rid of most, if not all, of your pain, typically within seven days. Of course, this estimate is just an average. Your case may be different. I’ve had clients who solved back-pain problems they’d suffered with for 15 years within two days (definitely a best-case scenario). Others took two or three weeks to get rid of 70 percent of their pain—a great outcome for those who had suffered daily for decades. In some rarer cases, clients had to use not only Muscle-Balance Therapy but a number of other approaches to get good results. If your situation happens to require “the kitchen sink,” you’ll find it in this book. And don’t worry—what you’ll discover in the following pages will pass your “commonsense” test with flying colors. As you read, you’ll find yourself nodding along and telling www.losethebackpain.com. Preface viii yourself, “Yes, this makes sense.” But let me warn you in advance: Your doctor, chiropractor, massage therapist, or physical therapist may not be familiar with these principles. We’ll get into why that’s the case in later chapters. So that’s my story of how I accidentally and reluctantly became a widely followed expert on using nonmedical approaches to eliminate stubborn, recurring back pain, and how I came to develop and popularize Muscle-Balance Therapy. Oh, and in case you’re wondering what happened to Maria and me: She felt terribly guilty for the pain I suffered because of all that running. It certainly wasn’t her fault, but she still took care of me during the weeks that followed my grocery- store collapse. In the end, I guess I needn’t have worried about it, as we continued to date each other and ultimately got married. Today, we have eight children in our happy family. But enough about me. Let’s get started on getting rid of your back pain so you, too, can live a pain-free life.

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.